Noticed on vowe.net, which was quoting from this article, this is a lovely little paragraph:
Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity. When I was CTO of a web design firm, I noticed in staff meetings that we only ever talked about process when we were avoiding talking about people. "We need a process to ensure that the client does not get half-finished design sketches" is code for "Greg fucked up." The problem, of course, is that much of this process nevertheless gets put in place, meaning that an organization slowly forms around avoiding the dumbest behaviors of its mediocre...

My Star Wars Galaxies initial impressions.
I should probably start by saying that I didn't expect to enjoy this game. A few of my friends had been involved in the beta testing, and from some of their comments and frustrations I honestly thought that SWG wasn't really going to do much for me. However, I was wrong.
Mixing and matching clothing allowsone to create a new profession: Flasher!
For anyone who doesn't know about Star Wars Galaxies, a quick google search will sort you out. However, anyone with a passing interest in games, and more specifically in...

After getting Star Wars Galaxies in the weekend, I'm going to write a little ramble with my first opinions of it. So far, I'm enjoying it - which is good as I didn't think I was going to like it. For anyone else in New Zealand who was thinking of playing, but didn't know where to source a copy, then check out the Gameplanet Store as they ended up importing a lot of copies.
One of the things I've wanted to do for a while is an all time definitive hate list for Road etiquette. In London things were pretty bad,...

It seems someone who knows me, or someone who doesn't know me but has me in their address book (urr yeah that possibility is somewhat worrying) is infected with the lovely new Sobig variant, Sobig.F! Woo! If it's you, then you can check this page to get a bit of info about it and possibly go about disinfecting yourself.
It's always nice to be running a Notes client for email when these viruses do their rounds..
A few minutes after writing this I heard a rather amusing "news" article on the radio. The newsreader helpfully informed listeners to be wary of ANYTHING...

Here's a little hint for those of you who are running a phone support type operation.
You should ensure that all of your operators are reasonably proficient in the language of the country that you are attempting to offer support for. This ensures that a correct flow of information can occur between yourselves and the customer.
For those of you who have trouble translating this into the consequences it may have for your business, let me do the translation for you - IF YOU ARE SUPPORTING AN ENGLISH SPEAKING COUNTRY THEN YOUR PHONE OPERATORS SHOULD SPEAK FUCKING ENGLISH FOR FUCKS SAKES.

Did you know that SCART cables are directional?
If yes, then you should just fuck off you smug git. I didn't know this, and spent a bit of time wondering why I couldn't use one of the SCART -> RCA adaptors that came with my XBox in order to get a signal from my Satellite decoder to run through to the TV in my bedroom.
After a bit (!) of cursing I started wondering if they were directional, as I'd used 2-3 different adaptors, but all of them were meant to feed into a television, not out from a device. Finally, wandering...

It made me laugh. I was just thinking of those people who kind of wander up to you, and you can just tell they're about to ask something stupid/annoying.. the way they slink up slowly, the way they make a small amount of small talk that they somehow consider obligitory before asking for that pain in the ass request. I guess scenes like this aren't uncommon in America, but over here I can but dream.. Click!

Sometimes you have to wonder how some people get employed. Pulling little (!) events from the last week of my life, I could count probably 10-20 instances of fucktards who don't really deserve to be alive, let alone to be paid to fuckup something as routine and mundane that they happen to call a "job", however, the thing that just set me off is a little article on XtraMSN.
The article in question is about, of course, you guessed it, the W32 Blaster worm. Oooooh! How scary. Yeah well it's a bad fucker, but that's not the point. The point is...

For anyone accessing the Merauderweb RSS feed, it has changed URL due to Kaare moving his server. The URL is now:
http://80.63.219.110/users/Merauder/home.nsf/rssfeed.xml
I guess this only has to happen a few times before I go insane and switch to a Domain Name provider that doesn't use frame based web direction, but until then..

My good friend Danjuma from the Bank of Lagos emailed me offering a promise of my share of $20m (US) dollars of money that was currently stranded in Nigeria! Clearly I've always wanted a shot at seeing how long I could keep these guys interested for, and to what extremities of stupidity I could take them. I realise it's not exactly an original idea, places such as Something awful have done this shit many times over, but still I wanted to try it my way.
I actually bcc'ed my replies to a fair few of my friends, however most of them...

How can a piece of Software called "Rational" be anything but.
A console for the license server that doesn't output error messages at all when run as a service. When run from a command shell it doesn't display any error messages but informs you that they can be turned on if you desire - this is when in the background there are fatal errors happening preventing the thing from starting. It's great! Oh, and don't think I'm overlooking messages in the event log, or somewhere like a custom named log file - I'm not.
The Client install takes forever to decompress,...